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Economist 3.x app

• It is bloated and very sluggish compared to its 2.x predecessor.
  Many things, like opening the menu to change text size and trying to swipe to move articles are appallingly slow (and on some occasions plain don't work until one restarts the app).
• Downloading the whole edition for offline reading (how I always operate) takes several minutes, compared to a few seconds with the 2.x version.
  Maybe this is because the download includes all the audio bits and large images - none of which I want anyway.
• It's almost impossible to swipe right or left to move to next/previous article.
• Article pages have more clutter (larger images, endless links to audio versions, etc), so less text.
  See screenshots of top of article on 2.x and 3.x and bottom of article on 2.x and 3.x
• The maximum text size is smaller than I prefer.
  See screenshots of 2.x and 3.x
• Changing to dark/night mode takes more keystrokes.
  In 2.x it's an option (Night Mode) on the top-right three-dots menu
  In 3.x you have to click the Tt menu option (which often fails to work), then Edit display settings then Dark mode
• The section order (Leaders, Letters, Briefing, United States, ...) differs from the 2.x one which is the same as in the (UK) print edition (Leaders, Letters, Britain, ...).
  I much prefer the latter. I suspect the 3.x one matches the US print edition (though I've also had the impression it changes from week to week).
  There should, at least, be a user option for the preferred order.
• The only positive thing is that in Landscape mode the left and right gutters are not as wide as with the 2.x version ;-)

Economist 2.3+ app (vs. 2.1)

1. Requires login every week (at least)

   From 17-Mar-2020 one can still download the entire issue fine, but any attempt to read an article demands login again (even when you are offline). This happens each week. Full reinstall did not fix it (or change the version number).

2. Loses your place when you close and reopen the app

   In the 2.1 app, if you closed it, or restarted your device, then next time you opened the app it immediately opened the last article you had been reading.
   With the new one you are placed on the front page of the app (the index of available copies). When you click on the one you were reading it briefly shows you that page, but then replaces it with an advert that you must swipe to dismiss. Having done so, you are on the table of contents (ToC) for the issue, not the article you were reading.
   After reinstall on 15-Sep, the swipe page when you re-open has gone, but you are still placed back on the ToC after a flash of the page you were reading. After 2.4.0 appeared the swipe page is back again.
   In 2.7.1 the swipe seems to have gone again and you are (sometimes/always?) placed back into the article you were reading.

3. Massive wasted space in Landscape mode causes overmuch paging

   Landscape mode is probably the dominant format on tablets (whose cases tend to operate that way), and there's now much wasted space either side of the text.
   One can understand that this makes the app simpler by not changing the line lengths between Portrait and Landscape, but it means three times more paging is required compared to 2.1 (which re-formatted to account for the orientation).

4. No indication of article length

   This is infuriating. As you move into a new article the 2.1 app showed the page count giving you a feel as to whether this is a normal length article or a long essay one.
   NB: 2.1 on a small device such as a phone behaved the same. But, I can't think that many folk read on such a device.

5. No indication of progress through an article

   2.1 on a tablet showed the page number.
   In 2.9 there's a transient vertical indicator on the right-hand edge when you scroll but a) it's not there when not scrolling, b) right-handed folk will rarely see it because it is under your swiping hand, c) it's almost too faint to see in normal mode, and d) it's invisible in Night mode.

6. More clicks/strokes to read an article

   In 2.1 on a tablet you swiped or clicked right/left to read through an article a page-at-a-time, needing only one touch to move from page to page.
   Now you must scroll-down which takes much more finger work.

7. No front cover image on the index page

   After downloading a new issue and then going offline to read it, the image for the issue shows as a white rectangle with a circulating busy cursor in it. See screenshot.
   You can force the image to reappear by closing the app, going online and reopening, closing the app again, going offline and then reopening!

8. Swipe to next/previous article does not preserve location in article

   In 2.1 on a small device, where next/previous article was with right/left swipe as it now is on a tablet, if you inadvertently moved to a different article, you just swiped back and were at the same location within the one you had left. Now you always lose your place, being placed at the top of the newly opened article.

9. Expansion in landscape mode clips image

   If you touch an image - particularly KAL's cartoon - to get a larger view when in landscape mode, the image is clipped so you don't see all the detail.

10. Hyphenated words can have hyphens removed

    For instance, in the 2020 January 18-24 issue's "Special report on Housing", the last sentence in the fifth paragraph of the "Building up" piece has the word owner-occupation. In the print edition, this is broken across lines on the hyphen. In the app it is not on a line break (in either Portrait or Landscape mode) and the word becomes owneroccupation.

HMRC Community Forums

1. SA106 / Chargeable Event Certificate
2. Lease extension premium

Ubuntu GVIM cannot update file on SMB share

Visual Studio Installer leaves growing collection of identical single-file folders in %temp%

Visual Studio Installer leaves growing collection of identical folders in %temp%

OpenOffice Writer: spurious and erroneous text when reading .docx

OpenOffice Calc Cannot "Search for Styles" for style used in Conditional Formatting

OpenOffice Calc sets "Wrap text automatically" on when loading .xls file with linefeeds in cells

OpenOffice Calc duplicates text when importing from .xlsx

Amazon (Boto3) feature request: faster S3 ACL info access

DroidVim switches to Japanese characters if plain text file contains "8-bit" character

Windows 10 Creators Upgrade - Not enough space and no option to use other storage

The upgrade is more or less a full Windows reinstall. As such it needs about 8 Gig. In previous major upgrades, the installer let you select another local drive or mounted disk if there is not 8 Gig on C:

In this one, there is no such option, and the only option is to create a USB to install from, as per answers.microsoft.com.

Clearly the Creators nomenclature means written by novices with no concept of the real world.

Android Chrome mis-sizes fonts

A "feature" of Chrome on Android (which is not on Chrome on a PC) is to up-size fonts in some parts of a page, regardless of their default or explicit CSS markup.
To illustrate, this afonts.htm page appears with its first line in tiny font and the rest in a larger one (screenshots on a Moto E 4G phone and a Google Nexus 10 tablet). According to this and this stackoverflow posts, it is due to deliberate Font Boosting feature.

For what it's worth, I posted this bug using the Report an Issue option on from Chrome on a PC:

To try to fix this on our pages, we have, as suggested in many posts, this in our CSS: html * {max-height:1000000px;}
Sadly it doesn't work on all (including this page).

Windows 10 printer device settings losing Duplex installable options

From some time in early 2017 an HP (CP2025dn) printer we have setup to use the HP Color Laserjet CP202X PCL6 Class driver (which has a built-in duplexer) keeps on losing the installable option for the Duplex Unit. The pattern may be that it goes if the printer has been used and then is turned off before Windows is shut down.

I have tried various fiddles, prompted by, inter alia, posts: Duplex setting on printer not persistent, How can I install the same printer twice? and, after messing up when trying to disable changes to the driver settings (removing all Admin update access!) "Access is denied, unable to remove" when deleting printer

HaveIbeenPwned support for Googlemail addressing aliases syntax

Does your email search takes account of the flexibility of some email address variations?
For instance, as I'm sure you know, a Googlemail address can have, before the @, as many dot's as you like and anything including and following a plus (ref: lifehacker article).

Already a discussion point (where I have now voted) at: HIBP Customer Feedback

Ubuntu 16.04 Files application broken

Default Files application is missing lots of features.
Work-around: replace it with Nemo (from Ubuntu Software - replacing Files 3.14.3 with Nemo 2.8.6)
See: my post and existing bug

pycurl error 6, 'Could not resolve: ... Domain name not found'

I started getting this when we moved from Sky to Virgin broadband, which replaced the router/DNS engine. This in turn hit a bug in the way pycurl is built for Windows.
(poor) work-around: wire each device I need to pycurl to into C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
See: mailing list

Pycurl 7.19.5 on Windows ignores SSL options to use client (X.509) certificate

The "distribution" (pycurl-7.19.5.win32-py2.7.msi or pycurl-7.19.5.win32-py3.4.msi) under either python 2.7.6 or 3.4.0 ignores any curl.setopt(curl.SSLxxx) calls to specify a client certificate and instead uses the most recent (or only) certificate in the local machines Internet Explorer store.
See: Github issue and curl-and-python-bounces@cool.haxx.se mailing list with subject "Convert client-certificate curl.exe command to pycurl"

Windows 8 Explorer search doesn't work

See thread.

Wish list for better DiffMerge long line handling

See thread

Closed / no longer an issue

Text below nested list in OpenOffice Writer

1. First item in outer list
   1. First item in nested list
      Text added (with shift-enter) or by overflow from line above.
   2. Second item in nested list
      More text for second item...
   Some text in first item of outer list, below the nested list.
2. Second item in outer list

Python re.sub(r'.*', ...) duplicates the matched string

Python code to decode Windows licence

GVIM SH syntax highlighting problem (complex quoting)

Switches between single- and double-quoting with text including backslashes confused the highlighter. Worked-round by adding two redundant backslashes (in red) to the quoted SED script (from nas-sync.sh):
  sed -n '
  1,/^pwa\.setup(pwa\.userhome,/d
  s/^\(,title:\)'"'\\([^']*\\)'$/\1\2/"'
  # Translate encoded single quote:
  s/\\x26#39\\x3B/'"'"'/g
  ...   '
See Github issue 1786

setActiveSheet does not work in Hidden mode in OpenOffice CALC API

So, eg, using (modified) unoconv to convert all sheets involves flashing actions on screen.
See Issue 127395 and Github pull/199 asking for a new format option (-f csvsheets) to export all worksheets from a spreadsheet to CSV rather than just the first.

Files created with CYGWIN have "NULL SID:(DENY)" windows ACL, inter alia

Android Chrome's Reader Mode disappeared

This mode (aka: Simplified View) used to be enabled with a chrome://flags setting. From a release in late 2019 this setting was removed and you now set it with Settings | Accessibility | Simplified view for web pages (when supported)
Sadly, if you used to have the flag set, this was not moved into the new control.
See also my (mis-targeted) post on stackexchange.

Visual Studio Python 3.6 Intellisense does not know re.IGNORECASE

It's OK with 3.4 but seems to not know any of the normal "top level" flags.
Fixed in Visual Studio 15.9.3
Ref: Dev community post

Amazon "Manage Your Content and Devices" capped at 100 books

Having just gone over 100 books, we find that this webpage will not show more than 100 books. At the top of the page one sees something like: "Showing 1 - 100 of 102 items in Books--All" but there is no option to scroll onto, for instance, a page 2 to show the others.
Since Amazon don't deign to run a bug reporting system available to it's users I had to report this by phone to them (16-May-2018). The support person claimed she understood the problem and would raise it with the developers.
But, given Amazon's miserable handling of large collections I can't say I hold out much hope.
NB: the problem does not exist in the Kindle app
Jul-2018: problem has been fixed! Page load now auto-loads all (we now have 113 books).

Vimtouch (Android) can't edit .vimrc

The standard one is in a protected (on non-rooted devices) part of the Android file system ($VIM/vimrc which is /data/data/net.momodalo.app.vimtouch/files/vim/vimrc).
I suggest/request an optional one in, for instance, /storage/emulated/0/Download/vimrc
See Issue 90
We've now moved to DroidVim which does allow .vimrc editing.

Kindle App BUG: Delete bookmark from Notebook not working

If you use the trash icon in the Notebook to delete bookmarks (eg: because you have several you want to delete) it invariably fails to do anything. If you are lucky and keep clicking trash icons for different bookmarks you can sometimes get rid of some of them.
See KindleQnA
Apr-2018: much better for the last few months, though still a bit erratic.

BlueGriffon $date= markup

See thread.
No longer use BlueGriffon.

Yahoo Groups daily digest mail doesn't work in Gmail

Thread no longer exists: https://suggestions.yahoo.com/detail/?prop=groups&fid=329791

Visual Studio HTML (web forms) editor Split view

This used to work when I had VS Community 2015 installed (after setting the editor as per to stackoverflow/carpetflyer). And, when I upgraded to 2017 it stayed OK. But then I foolishly uninstalled 2015 and the Split view no longer worked (and Design view hangs).
Problem solved by re-running the VS Installer, using Modify and installing the ASP.NET and web development component which showed as not installed, despite the fact that it had been installed before - it was the HTML (web forms) editor that was not working.
See my comments on dev community.

Python: Write/print newline to sys.stdout without a carriage return under Windows

Python 3 normally forces \n to \r\n. See my Stackoverflow post and the messy work-arounds required!

Kindle App BUG: change Device Name fails

See KindleQnA

Ubuntu 14.04 compiz makes it unusable on low-powered PC

See Compiz CPU usage dramatically increased in Ubuntu 14.04.

OpenOffice 4.0.1 Spreadsheet crashes inserting a row

See thread. Fixed in 4.1

Picasa 3.9 breaks sync-to-web

See thread.
As per my 16-Jun-2012 update, the work-around didn't last long. So we still wait for a post-3.9 version that works again.
Sadly - Picasa (PC) is now a no-longer product.

Windows 8.1 upgrade fails with Error code: 0x80073bc3

Threads: social.technet.microsoft.com answers.microsoft.com and M$ support ticket.

Python supplied with Apache OpenOffice 4.0.0 aborts with Segmentation violation

Fixed in 4.0.1 - see bugzilla.

Windows 8 Task Scheduler will not run "At system startup" task

See thread

Thunderbird parent.lock behaviour changed

This prevented my (part scripted) mechanism to control cross-platform (Windows and Linux) access to the same profile (on a shared drive).
See thread.

Ubuntu bugs

• Sound stopped in Hardy (8.04) after some auto update (came back again on upgrade to 10.04)